The miraculous happened. On December 12, 1996 a crowd of 1000 birdwatchers, environmentalists, ranchers and federal agency staffers watched in silence as Jones Benaly, a Navajo healer and medicine man, knelt in prayer facing the Vermilion Cliffs in northern Arizona. Benaly tossed corn pollen in the air and waved eagle feathers to welcome the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) back to the canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. High above the floor of House Rock Valley, six young condors huddled in a wooden box waiting for freedom.

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt then led the crowd in a NASA-style countdown "5..4..3..2..1..FLY!" and bird number 150, a young male raised in captivity at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho, sprang from the box as if propelled by the wishes of the crowd below. He was followed immediately by the other five birds and proceeded to dazzle the onlookers with a series of short flights above the cliffs. The sheer size of the bird (9-1/2 to 10-foot wingspan) and the significance of the event caused onlookers to draw a collective breath and offer muffled cheers for the homely creatures. After a seventy-plus-year absence and four years of sometimes bitter struggle and heated negotiation, condors are back in the skies above the Colorado Plateau.

The birds will be monitored for up to one year. One of the birds, which had not integrated fully into the reindroduced flock, was killed by a bald eagle shortly after the reintroduction. If all is well, next year six more birds will be released at the Vermilion Cliffs site, and so on until a stable population of 150 California condors thrive through captive breeding and release and natural reproduction in the wild on the Colorado Plateau. One day soon, visitors to the region's spectacular national parks and monuments - Grand Canyon, Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Bryce Canyon, Zion - may look up and see one of these huge birds riding the thermal updrafts over canyons and red rock. As Navajo healer Jones Benaly said, "we welcome our brother home," the crowd gathered in the crisp December sunshine peered through binoculars and spotting scopes and agreed.